NO MORE PLASTIC TOYS!!!!

One of the other important ideas I came across in a book I have by Tim Seldin called "How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way" is what I fondly refer to as the magic box. We are lucky enough to have a calm and easy going baby who has, since the day we brought him home from the hospital, played nicely by himself for 20 or 30 minute sessions several times a day. In fact, when I was pregnant I made him a stationary mobile with a dowling cut in half and glued together to make an X and 10 4-inch soccer balls hanging from it with fishing line at different lengths. (Most mobiles for infants are too colourful - useless - and too fast for their little eyes to track. The soccer ball idea was NOT a gender-based one but because babies see best in shades of black and white when they are tiny. I looked for orcas but to no avail. In fact, C is still quite taken by black and white patterns.) Anyway, he would stare at this mobile for EVER and very quickly learned how to bat the ball with his fist. (He was very young, maybe 6 or 8 weeks old, and it was clear he wasn't sure HOW he made the ball move, but if he got riled up enough it surely would. This was amazing to witness -- how he (and I read this somewhere) would literally CHANGE HIS WORLD by moving the ball. Pretty cool!!) If one of us were so presumptuous as to assume he was bored or finished playing with the mobile and picked him up to complete some mundane task...oh, say, changing his diaper, he would fuss to be put back in his little cosleeper to continue his very important work, which clearly he was not yet finished.

In any case, I read in the aforementioned book about getting a basket and gathering 50-100 household objects and letting the baby (of sitting up age and beyond, even toddlers) investigate the basket and its contents. So I did, and he did!! Our basket (actually a nice fabric covered box, with a lid) currently contains things like a toothbrush (new), an old wallet, a glass apple I received as a gift from a student, a piece of tulle, a nailfile (clean, wooden), a hairband, a spoon, a hockey puck, a little clear glass bottle with black-eyed peas inside, a glass coaster thing that you put under the legs of dressers to not make marks in the carpet, a bandanna, a baby hairbrush and a clothespin. Other things too, but they have escaped me at this time. The point is to find things that are of different textures. The glass is cold to the touch, and hard and smooth, and so on. He LOVES this activity. He will play with the contents, then the box itself, FOREVER. The toothbrush is by far his current favourite.

It makes this MontessoriMom a happy one, since the box is neither plastic or electronic. It doesn't make noise, and it doesn't mindlessly entertain my baby while he sits there. He learns and explores of his own VOLITION. It is a magic box.